The Petrobras site at Manacaparu Lake, 50 miles west of Manaus, where a pipeline will connect to the port at Manaus. A second pipeline, to Porto Velho, has raised concerns about the environment and Indian rights.Credit
Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

URUCU, Brazil — In theory, the issue is a simple one: Brazil needs more sources of energy to keep its economy humming, and huge reserves of gas and oil are in the Amazon jungle. Problem solved.

Over the years, Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, has, in fact, invested more than $7 billion in Amazon exploration and development, and in 1986 it made a major find here. But only now — after a seemingly endless sequence of geographic, logistical, environmental and political challenges were overcome — is the first in what is intended as a series of pipelines finally being constructed, this one to carry gas the 400 miles from here to Manaus, a port city of 1.5 million at the junction of the region’s two biggest rivers that is emerging as an important industrial center.

“Everything in the Amazon requires preparation that is big, long and complicated, especially a pioneering effort like this one,” explained Joelson Falcão Mendes, the company’s regional director here. “You’ve got a harsh climate that limits you to working only four months a year in some places. You’re working in mud and crossing rivers that are not navigable, and there are 47 tropical diseases to worry about.”

But oil pipeline leaks and the collapse of an offshore drilling platform in other parts of the country have damaged Petrobras’s reputation, and there was initially strong resistance to the pipeline from local people, environmental and indigenous groups and archaeologists.

Some of them preferred that the gas be transported to Manaus by tankers from a terminal north of here, already connected by a pipeline, while others argued it would be cheaper and safer to buy the excess electricity generated by the Guri Dam in Venezuela.

Rather than steamrolling the opponents and skeptics, however, as often happens in Brazil, the company chose to woo them. The two million residents of Amazonas State have been promised economic benefits that have contributed to the project’s $1.15 billion price, and scientists and environmentalists were consulted about how to minimize damage to the jungle that blankets the state, which is larger than Britain, France, Germany and Italy combined.

“They have really tried to minimize the impact, and the outcome is not as bad as we had feared,” said Paulo Adário, director of Greenpeace’s Amazon campaign. “Since they are taking oil and gas out of the heart of the Amazon, creating a model for what will be done in the future, that concern is quite understandable and necessary.”

A second pipeline, which would head south to Porto Velho, a city more than 300 miles away, is a far more complicated matter. That project still faces challenges from advocates for the environment and rights of indigenous people because it will cross rivers and Indian lands, and is competing with two large dams for government money.

Farther west, near the Jurua River, Petrobras also has plans to develop oil and gas deposits first discovered in 1978. Company officials said they hoped to begin production in 2010, after construction of a pipeline that would run through dense and remote jungle to a refinery here.

Recent changes in energy policy in neighboring countries have added to the importance of the planned network of Amazon pipelines. For example, President Evo Morales of Bolivia, which has substantial reserves of gas that supply Brazil, has nationalized oil fields and refineries there, shutting out Petrobras, and has suggested quadrupling the price of some of the natural gas his country supplies to Brazil’s industrialized south.

“All the research indicates that we are certain to find more gas in the Amazon,” Eduardo Braga, the governor of Amazonas, said in an interview in Manaus, the state capital. “Brazil is going to need that gas over the next 30 years, so it is imperative that we develop those deposits. This is a strategic issue, not just for the Amazon but for all of Brazil.”

The challenges Petrobras has had to confront also raise questions about the viability of the grand plan of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, to build a 5,000-mile gas pipeline from Caracas to Buenos Aires, a cornerstone of his campaign to bring South America’s economies together.

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The New York Times

Initial estimates of the cost of that project, which would be longer than the Great Wall of China, run as high as $24 billion.

“The pipeline should be the locomotive of a new process of integration whose objective will be to defeat poverty and exclusion,” Mr. Chávez said during a visit to São Paulo, Brazil’s industrial capital, last year. “Unity is our only path.”

[On Thursday, Brazil and Venezuela signed an agreement that calls for studies to begin this year on construction of a pipeline to cut through the northern Amazon to Manaus and then split in two directions.]

But environmental groups have complained that Mr. Chávez is trying to rush or even bypass the hearings and studies that are normally required and that his plan would worsen problems of deforestation and population migration.

“Just imagine the rivers and vast areas of forest they would have to cross,” Mr. Adário said. “This is just something that just leaped out of Chávez’s head. I don’t know of a single technical expert or scientist who has done a serious analysis of the impacts that would have.”

In the past, the construction of large energy projects in the Amazon, such as the mammoth Tucuruí dam, typically led to the migration of thousands of peasants seeking work and the creation of slum settlements in the jungle. When a project is finished, the workers will often remain, with no jobs, swelling social and environmental problems that are already intractable.

Small jungle settlements along the path of transmission lines have also complained that no provision is made for them to be supplied electricity. That alienates local residents and has even provoked some incidents of sabotage.

Urucu, however, is being built with a requirement that two-thirds of the labor force be hired from the population already in the region. That has created about 10,000 jobs, a significant advance in a region with fewer than 500,000 people, as well as job-training programs.

To prevent an influx of settlers, who typically carve out illegal homesteads along highways, almost no permanent roads have been built.

Instead, the armed forces bring in supplies and equipment by helicopter or boat, and many construction workers live in floating dormitories that move from one site to the next as the work advances.

“There was a time when the only way to get in here was to come by helicopter and then rappel down,” said Mauro Loureiro, the project’s technical director. “It took hundreds of trips like that just to open a clearing to be able to do the initial soundings and then dig a test well.”

In addition, the pipeline here will include spurs to seven smaller towns on its way to Manaus, adding $30 million and 78 miles to the project. As a result, diesel fuel will no longer have to be sent in by boat for local consumption, blackouts will diminish and businesses can be promised regular supplies of cheap, clean energy.

“Each municipality is using this to increase its economic potential,” said Mr. Braga, the Amazonas governor. The projects, he said, include one to build a plant in Codajas to process açaí (pronounced ah-sigh-EE), an Amazon fruit whose purple pulp and juice Brazilians consume as a health and energy tonic, and another in, in Manacaparu, to expand the production of organic fibers there.

“The idea is not only to avoid repeating the errors committed in the past, but also to change the energy sources here in the north of the country,” Mr. Braga said. “More than 90 percent of this state is forest, and I want to keep it that way.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Vast Pipelines in Amazon Face Challenges Over Protecting Rights and Rivers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe